OK, it’s finally confession time.

As most of our community in China (and a few individuals in the States) have known for some time, the Johnson family plotted a great conspiracy by surreptitiously returning "home for the holidays".

Yes, that’s right!  We are back in the United States of America as I am typing this confession.

This plot, which was indeed a fairly recent development, came to fruition on December 20th when our plane touched down at the Sea-Tac Airport in Seattle.

Since that time, the Johnsons have gone to great lengths to SURPRISE as many family, friends, and community members as possible with our very presence.  This mission of secrecy was only possible through our own ability to carry out a plethora of half-truths, out-and-out lies, and deception.  (How Christian of us…)  We also had a few "creative" insiders helping us work through all the various angles of our scam in order to see it get its maximum impact.

For all these crimes we are accused of, we unapologetically plead GUILTY AS CHARGED. If we had it to do all over again, I have no doubt we would have pulled the trigger exactly as we did.  The look of shock, awe, confusion, and ultimately, delighted wonder, on people’s faces was well worth all the conspiratorial whispers, air miles, fake post-dated blog entries, and double-talk that it cost us.

All this to say, it’s really good to be home for a spell (we’ll be in the States through January) and I will always have fond memories of the Christmas that we just "showed up" (literally) unannounced on people’s doorsteps when they thought we were a million miles away in Xining.  It brought that unexpected joy back to the Christmas holiday for me.

Besides just being home to celebrate Christmas, some of the highlights of this conspiracy for me were the following:

• Setting up our good friends here in Seattle by making a Skype date with them.  Logging in to Skype and telling them to "hold on" for a few minutes because we had company.  We then proceeded to drive a few blocks to their house, knock on their front door, and watch their expressions of shock and wonder.  Quote: "You guys are not nice!"
• Showing up at our other friends’ home in a "caroling group".  Christa and I were singing from the back row.  It was kind of like setting off a hand grenade.  First you pull the pin, wait, wait, wait, throw…then BOOM!  Eventually their eyes made it to the back row singers and their mouths just dropped…
• Christa’s parents thought they were going to her brother’s house to meet his new girlfriend.  Little did they know they would be getting a very jet-lagged Johnson family instead.  We floored them for sure.
• In order to ensure that our daughters’ Christmas presents didn’t end up in Xining, Christa told her mom an elaborate story about a friend who was coming to visit us who had room in his luggage.  So instead of mailing the gifts, Christa’s mom turned them over to our friend, Josh, who was "in" on the conspiracy.  It was beautiful how well it worked…those presents never left the suburbs.
• Quote: "You’ve been LYING on your blog!"
• When I opened the front door to let Christa’s uncle come inside on Christmas day, he stopped in his tracks and said, "What! (long pause)  What are you doing here?!?"
• Quote: "When I first saw you come in, I thought to myself, ‘No, that can’t be Todd’. And then I said, ‘That is HIM!’"
• Quote: "What? This isn’t China." Nope, sure isn’t.

Obviously, there’s a lot more to tell.  It was a long decision-making process to even get here, but we’re here now and we’ll be making a trip down to Florida to visit my parents in a few weeks.  I would have spilled the beans sooner, but we had a few more people (blog readers!) left to surprise.  Now everyone (who reads this blog anyway) will know the truth.

It’s true; now we can’t be fully trusted.  But hopefully you can see it was all for a worthy cause.  I’m looking forward to telling you more of my post-return-to-America impressions (it’s been a year and a half) in the days and weeks to come.  My goal is to drink at least one latte every day.  I’ve missed a few so far, but not many.

(And by the way, in case you were wondering, this post about the Santa line was for real…  Shopping malls are really weird.)